Following the Red Stars' loss to the Portland Thorns, Head Coach Chris Petrucelli met with reporters. Read the full match recap here.
On Chris’ evaluation of the game (from Claire Watkins)
Chris Petrucelli: I thought that we were in the game, relatively even. I thought we started pretty well, we had the ball. They are obviously very talented and dangerous. We were in it at halftime and we lost a little discipline in the second half and we paid for it.
On regrouping after this game for a big game next week (from Claire Watkins)
Petrucelli: I think certainly our lack of composure hurt us and now we’ll be without a couple of players that are pretty important to us. You know Claire, it’s the same process we go through every game. We’ll go back, we’ll look at video, we’ll see what we can learn from it, we’ll go back into training and try to prepare for the next one. I don’t know if our process is going to change that much, but clearly we have to get going in the right direction here really fast.
On the starting lineup (from Claire Watkins)
Petrucelli: There were a few things going on that aren’t obvious to everybody. Rachel Hill was listed as available, but she really wasn’t available. She’s had a little bit of a hip flexor issue. So, that affected the wing back situation. Morgan being available for more minutes gave us some flexibility at midfield that we haven’t had all year. In order to keep Vanessa, Danny, Mal, Yuki and Morgan on the field it made sense to move Yuki to the nine. She’s played the nine, actually I think she played quite well until the game got out of hand, but I was really happy with what she did as the nine. It was just trying to incorporate Morgan, and we knew she wasn’t going to go 90 too, so we had some plans for later in the game, but obviously the game changed.
On what the plans are for the defense next week (from Claire Watkins)
Petrucelli: The good news is we’re getting more minutes out of Gilli (Arin Wright), so we have still have Gilli, Amanda and Tatumn, but we may have to make a choice on whether it’s a four back or a three back and go from there. We have some work to do on figuring that piece out.
On the mood at halftime (from Theo LLoyd-Hughes)
Petrucelli: We knew we were in the game. I wanted to see them take a little bit more risk when we got the ball forward. I felt like there were a number of times when we got the ball forward and instead of going at them, we passed the ball backwards and maybe we were giving a little too much respect as we were going forward. Clearly the game changed quickly in the second half.
On the game changing moments (from Theo LLoyd-Hughes)
Petrucelli: You saw it. We made a couple of poor decisions I think.